When Ingmar Bergman died a couple of weeks ago, all the talk was of Nordic miserablism and the intimidating nature of so-called 'arthouse' cinema. Even Newsnight turned its nose up at films that make demands on the audience's intelligence. However, the reissue of Bergman's final masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander (1983), proves him to have been anything but the gloomy Swede of lazy journalistic legend.

Following an idylic Christmas, Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) and Alexander Ekdahl (Bertil Guve) lose their actor father and their mother (Ewa Fröling) lodges them with Jewish antique dealer, Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), to spare them the rigid discipline of her new husband, Bishop Edvard Vergerus (Jan Malmsjö).

Running just over three hours, this domestic epic took six months to shoot and contains some 60 speaking parts and 1,200 extras. The project's impetus seems to have come from fellow director Kjell Grede's concern that Bergman often made such forbidding features when he possessed such a lust for life. But Bergman insisted that he was already contemplating a nostalgic piece containing autobiographical elements.

Speculation has since persisted about the extent to which the action was inspired by Bergman's own childhood. Many presumed that Alexander was his alter ego, but Bergman contended that he had more in common with the martinet bishop (although he clearly bore a resemblance to the director's father, who had been a chaplain to the Swedish Royal Family). He did, however, concede that Fanny's love of puppet theatre came from his sister Margaretha, while he shared Alexander's passion for silent cinema.

Evocatively designed by Anna Asp and Susanne Lingheim, and beautifully photographed by Sven Nykvist, the film is awash with enchanting details. But its strength lies in its contrasting moods and the vivid realism of its formal set-pieces: the yuletide festivities, the funeral and the climactic baptism.

The remainder of this week's releases pale beside this majestic achievement, with the biggest disappointment being Agnieszka Holland's Copying Beethoven. Renowned for Oliver Stone's Nixon and Michael Mann's Ali, screenwriters Stephen J.Rivele and Christopher Wilkinson obviously revel in biography. But this account of Beethoven's relationship with Anna Holtz, the amanuensis who became his final muse, all-too-quickly mires itself in Masterpiece Theatre verbosity as it tries to graft a beauty and the beast scenario on to a treatise on the mysteries of artistic creation. As with Raul Ruiz's recent biopic Klimt, this is beautifully photographed. But whereas Ruiz lost control while trying to convey the painter's visual genius, Agnieszka Holland's awed restraint similarly fails to find the perceptible equivalent of Beethoven's music. The picture briefly bursts into life during the audacious Ninth Symphony premiere. But Ed Harris's bombastic mugging and Diane Kruger's starstruck simpering deprive this worthy but flawed drama of some much-needed intellectual depth and soul.

Corneliu Porumboiu, who won the Camera d'or at Cannes for the Best First Feature, provides plenty of both in 12:08 East of Bucharest, in which a television show designed to mark the 16th anniversary of the overthrow of the tyrannical Ceausescu regime spirals into chaos.

The opening slice of wry realism reveals that liberty has done little for either drunken history teacher Teo Corban, who has to borrow cash from a Chinese shopkeeper to present his wife with some housekeeping after paying off his latest debts, or Mircea Andreescu, a testy old-timer who reluctantly agrees to reprise the role of Santa for the kids in his tenement block. Yet they're both ready to recall their part in the Revolution when pompous host Ion Sapdaru calls them at the 11th hour after his original panel cries off. However, the programme soon descends into accusation and recrimination, as callers challenge Corban's account of his rabble-rousing patriotism and it quickly becomes clear that the town stumbled into freedom rather than striding along in the vanguard.

Lacing the egocentric assertions and sneering contradictions with satirical wit, Porumboiu shoots the show in a static public access style (apart from the occasional judder caused by a wonky tripod) to keep the focus firmly on Corban's fake heroics. Consequently, the grudges, figments and prejudices that have been carried over from the Communist era relentlessly suggest a country still preoccupied with its past rather than confidently anticipating its future.

Finally, some more home truths emerge in Marek Koterski's hard-hitting drama We Are All Christs, as a teacher is forced to confront the alcoholism that has destroyed his relationship with his son. As the flashbacking action shows Andrzej Chyra reneging on a vow not to follow in his own drunken father's footsteps, Koterski uses his shifting narrative perspective to suggest the differing impressions that momentous events have made on the pair and posits that the plight of Poland may be as much responsible for Chyra's failings as his own flawed personality.